A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY1456 start with P start with P
Propaganda Blitz shows that the corporate media does not just 'spin' the news - it fundamentally distorts everything it touches, hiding the real issues from public view, and often completely reversing the truth. This book uncovers a storm of top-down campaigns behind war reporting from Iraq, Syria and Palestine, as well as the destruction of the credibility of figures on the left, including Jeremy Corbyn and Hugo Chavez.
Exposing propagandists at the top levels of the BBC, as well as their reporting on the Scottish independence referendum, the dismantling of the NHS and looming climate chaos, Propaganda Blitz explains the real meaning of 'objective' journalism, exposes the fake news about 'fake news' and outlines a model for anti-business media activism.
Chubin brings attention to the varying class, ethnic, religious, and national identities of NGO staff and clients that shaped their differing understandings of oppression and justice. Her examination of the tensions within the organization reveals why the efforts of the NGO workers failed to gain purchase among the intended beneficiaries.
Proper Women concludes by encouraging feminist activists to not only examine the role of local politics and transnational connections in shaping their definitions of empowerment, but also consider the advantages of a justice-enhancing practice as opposed to justice monism for their target populations.
Property, Substance, and Effect draws on Marilyn Strathern’s longstanding interest in the reification of social relations. If the world is shrinking in terms of resources and access to them, it is expanding in terms of new candidates for proprietorship. How new relations are brought into being is among the many questions about property, ownership, and knowledge that these essays bring together.
Twenty years have not diminished the interest in the book’s opening challenge: if one were inventing a method of enquiry by which to configure the complexity of social life, one might wish to invent something like the anthropologist’s ethnographic practice. A wide range of studies deliberately brings into conversation claims people make on one another through relations imagined in the form of body-substance along with the increasing visibility of conceptual or intellectual work as property. Whether one lives in Papua New Guinea or Great Britain, categories of knowledge are being dissolved and reformed at a tempo that calls for reflection—and for the kind of lateral reflection afforded through the “ethnographic effect.”
In nineteenth-century America, many black women left their homes, their husbands, and their children to spread the Word of God. Descendants of slaves or former “slave girls” themselves, they traveled all over the country, even abroad, preaching to audiences composed of various races, denominations, sexes, and classes, offering their own interpretations of the Bible. When they were denied the pulpit because of their sex, they preached in tents, bush clearings, meeting halls, private homes, and other spaces. They dealt with domestic ideologies that positioned them as subservient in the home, and with racist ideologies that positioned them as naturally inferior to whites. They also faced legalities restricting blacks socially and physically and the socioeconomic reality of often being part of a large body of unskilled laborers.
Jarena Lee, Julia Foote, Maria Stewart, and Frances Gaudet were four women preachers who endured such hardships because of their religious convictions. Often quoting from the scripture, they insisted that they were indeed prophesying daughters whom God called upon to preach. Significantly, many of these women preachers wrote autobiographies in which they present images of assertive, progressive, pious women—steadfast and unmovable in their religious beliefs and bold in voicing their concerns about the moral standing of their race and society at large.
Chanta M. Haywood examines these autobiographies to provide new insight into the nature of prophesying, offering an alternative approach to literature with strong religious imagery. She analyzes how these four women employed rhetorical and political devices in their narratives, using religious discourse to deconstruct race, class, and gender issues of the nineteenth century.
By exploring how religious beliefs become an avenue for creating alternative ideologies, Prophesying Daughters will appeal to students and scholars of African American literature, women’s studies, and religious studies.
-Ian Hodder, Current Anthropology
Nearly everyone in the archaeological community read Taylor’s book at the time, and despite the negative reaction, many were influenced by it. Few young scholars dared to directly engage and build on his “conjunctive approach,” yet his suggested methods nevertheless began to be adopted and countless present-day authors highlight his impact on the 1960s formation of the “New Archaeology.” In
Prophet, Pariah, and Pioneer, peers, colleagues, and former students offer a critical consideration of Taylor’s influence and legacy. Neither a festschrift nor a mere analysis of his work, the book presents an array of voices exploring Taylor and his influence, sociologically and intellectually, as well as the culture of American archaeology in the second half of the twentieth century.
A searching account of nineteenth-century salvage anthropology, an effort to preserve the culture of “vanishing” Indigenous peoples through dispossession of the very communities it was meant to protect.
In the late nineteenth century, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, and other chroniclers began amassing Indigenous cultural objects—crafts, clothing, images, song recordings—by the millions. Convinced that Indigenous peoples were doomed to disappear, collectors donated these objects to museums and universities that would preserve and exhibit them. Samuel Redman dives into the archive to understand what the collectors deemed the tradition of the “vanishing Indian” and what we can learn from the complex legacy of salvage anthropology.
The salvage catalog betrays a vision of Native cultures clouded by racist assumptions—a vision that had lasting consequences. The collecting practice became an engine of the American museum and significantly shaped public education and preservation, as well as popular ideas about Indigenous cultures. Prophets and Ghosts teases out the moral challenges inherent in the salvage project. Preservationists successfully maintained an important human inheritance, sometimes through collaboration with Indigenous people, but collectors’ methods also included outright theft. The resulting portrait of Indigenous culture reinforced the public’s confidence in the hierarchies of superiority and inferiority invented by “scientific” racism.
Today the same salvaged objects are sources of invaluable knowledge for researchers and museum visitors. But the question of what should be done with such collections is nonetheless urgent. Redman interviews Indigenous artists and curators, who offer fresh perspectives on the history and impact of cultural salvage, pointing to new ideas on how we might contend with a challenging inheritance.
For almost four centuries, the indigenous Chiripá (Guaraní) people of eastern Paraguay have maintained themselves as a distinct society and culture, despite continual and often intense relations with Paraguayan society and the international economy. In this study, Richard K. Reed explores the economic and social basis for this ethnic autonomy.
Reed finds that Chiripá economic power derives from their practice of commercial agroforestry. Unlike Latin American indigenous societies that have been forced to clear land for commercial agriculture, the Chiripá continue to harvest and sell forest products, such as caffeinated yerba mate, without destroying the forests. Reed also explores the relation of this complex economy to Chiripá social organization and shows how flexible kin ties allowed the Chiripá to adapt to the pressure and opportunities of the commercial economy without adopting the authoritarian nature of rural Paraguayan society.
These findings offer important insights into the relations among indigenous groups, nation-states, and the international economy. They also provide a timely alternative model for sustainable management of subtropical forests that will be of interest in the fields of development and environmental studies.
A focus on the representation of everyday life in women’s prose reveals that a first generation of female writers (Natal’ia Baranskaia, Irina Grekova) both legitimated and limited their successors (Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Tat’iana Tolstaia, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Svetlana Vasilenko) in their choice of literary topics. The Prose of Life traces the development, and intriguing ruptures, of recent Russian women’s prose, becoming a must-read for readers interested in Russian literature and gender studies.
2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine
From two leading experts, a revolutionary new way to think about and measure aging.
Aging is a complex phenomenon. We usually think of chronological age as a benchmark, but it is actually a backward way of defining lifespan. It tells us how long we’ve lived so far, but what about the rest of our lives?
In this pathbreaking book, Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov provide a new way to measure individual and population aging. Instead of counting how many years we’ve lived, we should think about the number of years we have left, our “prospective age.” Two people who share the same chronological age probably have different prospective ages, because one will outlive the other. Combining their forward-thinking measure of our remaining years with other health metrics, Sanderson and Scherbov show how we can generate better demographic estimates, which inform better policies. Measuring prospective age helps make sense of observed patterns of survival, reorients understanding of health in old age, and clarifies the burden of old-age dependency. The metric also brings valuable data to debates over equitable intergenerational pensions.
Sanderson and Scherbov’s pioneering model has already been adopted by the United Nations. Prospective Longevity offers us all an opportunity to rethink aging, so that we can make the right choices for our societal and economic health.
Fresh from receiving a doctorate from Cornell University in 1933, but unable to find work, Charles M. Wiltse joined his parents on the small farm they had recently purchased in southern Ohio. There, the Wiltses scratched out a living selling eggs, corn, and other farm goods at prices that were barely enough to keep the farm intact.
In wry and often affecting prose, Wiltse recorded a year in the life of this quintessentially American place during the Great Depression. He describes the family’s daily routine, occasional light moments, and their ongoing frustrations, small and large—from a neighbor’s hog that continually broke into the cornfields to the ongoing struggle with their finances. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had little to offer small farmers, and despite repeated requests, the family could not secure loans from local banks to help them through the hard economic times. Wiltse spoke the bitter truth when he told his diary, “We are not a lucky family.” In this he represented millions of others caught in the maw of a national disaster.
The diary is introduced and edited by Michael J. Birkner, Wiltse’s former colleague at the Papers of Daniel Webster Project at Dartmouth College, and coeditor, with Wiltse, of the final volume of Webster’s correspondence.
Noted anthropologist Maurice Bloch has written a powerful and critical new foreword to the English translation, which allows the reader to view Mannoni’s unique work in its historical and intellectual context.
Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World explores the implications of sex-for-pay across a broad span of time, from ancient Mesopotamia to the early Christian period. In ancient times, although they were socially marginal, prostitutes connected with almost every aspect of daily life. They sat in brothels and walked the streets; they paid taxes and set up dedications in religious sanctuaries; they appeared as characters—sometimes admirable, sometimes despicable—on the comic stage and in the law courts; they lived lavishly, consorting with famous poets and politicians; and they participated in otherwise all-male banquets and drinking parties, where they aroused jealousy among their anxious lovers.
The chapters in this volume examine a wide variety of genres and sources, from legal and religious tracts to the genres of lyric poetry, love elegy, and comic drama to the graffiti scrawled on the walls of ancient Pompeii. These essays reflect the variety and vitality of the debates engendered by the last three decades of research by confronting the ambiguous terms for prostitution in ancient languages, the difficulty of distinguishing the prostitute from the woman who is merely promiscuous or adulterous, the question of whether sacred or temple prostitution actually existed in the ancient Near East and Greece, and the political and social implications of literary representations of prostitutes and courtesans.
– Catharine R. Stimpson
Jeffrey Nichols examines how prostitution became a focal point in the moral contest between Mormons and gentiles and aided in the construction of gender systems, moral standards, and the city's physical and economic landscapes. Gentiles likened polygamy to prostitution and accused polygamous Mormons of violating Christian norms of family structure and sexual behavior. Defending their church and its ideals, Mormons blamed gentiles for introducing the sinful business of prostitution into their honorable city. Nichols traces the interplay of prostitution and reform from the 1890s, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began to move away from polygamy, to World War I, when Mormon and gentile moral codes converged at the expense of prostitutes. He also considers how the conflict over polygamy distinguished Salt Lake City from other cities struggling to abolish prostitution in the Progressive Era.
The author has conducted an impressive amount of research in nine countries, including conversations with male and female sex tourists, adult and child prostitutes, procurers, and clients. Through her research, O'Connell Davidson demonstrates the complexity of prostitution, arguing that it is not simply an effect of male oppression and violence or insatiable sexual needs, nor is it an unproblematic economic encounter. The book provides a sophisticated explanation of the economic and political inequalities underlying prostitution, but also shows that while prostitution necessarily implies certain freedoms for the clients, the amount of freedom experienced by individual prostititutes varies greatly.
This highly accessible book will be of great interest to those in gender and women's studies, sexuality and cultural studies, the sociology of work and organizations, and social policy. General readers will also appreciate having new ways of thinking about this age-old social phenomenon.
Julia O'Connell Davidson is Lecturer in Sociology, University of Leicester.
What can neighborhood baseball tell us about class and gender cultures, urban change, and the ways that communities value public space? Through a close exploration of a boys’ baseball league in a gentrifying neighborhood of Philadelphia, sociologist Sherri Grasmuck reveals the accommodations and tensions that characterize multicultural encounters in contemporary American public life. Based on years of ethnographic observation and interviews with children, parents, and coaches, Protecting Home offers an analysis of the factors that account for racial accommodation in a space that was previously known for racial conflict and exclusion. Grasmuck argues that the institutional arrangements and social characteristics of children’s baseball create a cooperative environment for the negotiation of social, cultural, and class differences.
Chapters explore coaching styles, parental involvement, institutional politics, parent-child relations, and children’s experiences. Grasmuck identifies differences in the ways that the mostly white, working-class “old-timers” and the racially diverse, professional newcomers relate to the neighborhood. These distinctions reflect a competing sense of cultural values related to individual responsibility toward public space, group solidarity, appropriate masculine identities, and how best to promote children’s interests—a contrast between “hierarchical communalism” and “child-centered individualism.”
Through an innovative combination of narrative approaches, this book succeeds both in capturing the immediacy of boys’ interaction at the playing field and in contributing to sophisticated theoretical debates in urban studies, the sociology of childhood, and masculinity studies.
It is a commonplace that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this startlingly new historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled, and dependent citizens. During the late nineteenth century, competitive party politics in American democracy led to the rapid expansion of benefits for Union Civil War veterans and their families.
Some Americans hoped to expand veterans' benefits into pensions for all of the needy elderly and social insurance for workingmen and their families. But such hopes went against the logic of political reform in the Progressive Era. Generous social spending faded along with the Civil War generation.
Instead, the nation nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than forty states enacted social spending, labor regulations, and health education programs to assist American mothers and children. Remarkably, as Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of local women's clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country.
Blending original historical research with political analysis, Skocpol shows how governmental institutions, electoral rules, political parties, and earlier public policies combined to determine both the opportunities and the limits within which social policies were devised and changed by reformers and politically active social groups over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
By examining afresh the institutional, cultural, and organizational forces that have shaped U.S. social policies in the past, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers challenges us to think in new ways about what might be possible in the American future.
María de Zayas is unique in the seventeenth century as the only Spanish woman to write a collection of exemplary novels whose quality is often compared to Miguel de Cervantes’ masterful works. Her two main collections of short stories, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares and Desengaños amorosos, encompass a social critique based on literary fiction that exposes flaws in the idealized archetypes of masculine identity in early modern Spain. Zayas’s stories redefine women’s patriarchal disadvantage as a tool to expose the ways in which early modern Spanish women could be empowered to counteract men’s discursive and political authority, which they use to unfairly maintain their own social privilege.
Xabier Granja Ibarreche explores how Zayas defies Spanish hegemony by manipulating and transforming the ideals of courtly masculinity that had been popularized by conduct manuals and the traits they specified for appropriate noble comportment. In doing so, Zayas elaborates a nonofficial discourse throughout plots that subvert patriarchal hierarchies: she rearticulates the existing ideological order to empower women who are no longer willing to remain silent and oppressed by masculine domination after centuries of failing to attain a sufficiently self-sufficient political position to ascend in the social hierarchy. By inverting the male gaze that assumes masculinity as a preeminent identity, Zayas subverts the patriarchal subject/masculine, object/feminine order and destabilizes manly superiority as a basic universal reality, thereby empowering and unshackling Spanish women to liberate Iberian culture from the repressive and pernicious future she forebodes.
In addition to reviewing the existing literature on the political outcomes of social movements, this volume analyzes the examples of the American civil rights movement and anti-nuclear energy efforts in eighteen countries to forge a new understanding of their momentous impact.
In looking back on his editorship of Crisis magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois said, “We condensed more news about Negroes and their problems in a month than most colored papers before this had published in a year.” Since its founding by Du Bois in 1910, Crisis has been the primary published voice of the NAACP. Born in an age of Jim Crow racism, often strapped for funds, the magazine struggled and endured, all the while providing a forum for people of color to document their inherent dignity and proclaim their definitive worth as human beings.
As the magazine’s editor from 1910 until 1934, Du Bois guided the content and the aim of Crisis with a decisive hand. He ensured that each issue argued for civil rights, economic justice, and social equality, always framing America’s intractable color line in an international perspective. Du Bois benefited from a deep pool of black literary and artistic genius, whether by commissioning the visual creativity of Harlem Renaissance artists for Crisis covers or by publishing poems and short stories from New Negro writers. From North to South, from East to West, and even reaching across the globe, Crisis circulated its ideas and marshaled its impact far and wide.
Building on the solid foundation Du Bois laid, subsequent editors and contributors covered issues vital to communities of color, such as access to resources during the New Deal era, educational opportunities related to the historic Brown decision, the realization of basic civil rights at midcentury, American aid to Africa and Caribbean nations, and the persistent economic inequalities of today’s global era.
Despite its importance, little has been written about the historical and cultural significance of this seminal magazine. By exploring how Crisis responded to critical issues, the essays in Protest and Propaganda provide the first well-rounded, in-depth look at the magazine's role and influence. The authors show how the essays, columns, and visuals published in Crisis changed conversations, perceptions, and even laws in the United States, thereby calling a fractured nation to more fully live up to its democratic creed. They explain how the magazine survived tremendous odds, document how the voices of justice rose above the clamor of injustice, and demonstrate how relevant such literary, journalistic, and artistic postures remain in a twenty-first-century world still in crisis.
While there is an abundance of social science studies giving voice to the dominant actors of hegemonic violence in Hausa society, there is a dearth of works that center the voices of the afflicted, unprivileged, and marginalized class, among whom are women and youth. One aim of this book is to examine the ways popular songs and fiction fill up the humanistic urgency to capture the dignity of the life of those dehumanized by local, national, and international hegemonic religious and secular forces. The book focuses on the resistance narratives of one female novelist and six song composers and performers that generate alternative counterhegemonic responses to dominant patriarchal discourses produced by cultural, religious, and political elites, thus reaching out to marginalized local and national communities and global audiences. Alidou interweaves the social, political, and biomedical epidemics with the concept of “Hausa interiority” to create a unique perspective on contemporary Hausa culture and politics through the lens of artistic productions.
In the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Portland made national news with nightly social justice protests, often met with violent response by counter protestors and law enforcement. Though frequently regarded as a progressive hub, Portland has a long history of racial inequality and oppression, and the city’s entrenched divisions gained new attention during the Trump years. The photos in Protest City present a visceral visual record of this significant moment in Portland’s history.
Rian Dundon, who has been photographing the rise of extreme politics on the West Coast since 2016, lived only a short walk from the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd. For one hundred days, Dundon enmeshed himself in the demonstrations with an unobtrusive point-and-shoot camera. The result is a graphic portrayal of how social movements become politicized, how spectacle serves as a subtext to change in the digital age, and how modern protests blur distinctions among performance, ritual, and surveillance. As he follows the progress of Portland’s conflicts, Dundon draws connections to Oregon’s legacy as a stronghold of white supremacist extremism and interrogates the role of whiteness in racial justice movements.
Most of the photographs in the book were taken between May and October 2020, but the collection also includes photos from protests in late 2020 and 2021 around various related issues, including the Red House eviction blockade, rightwing demonstrations on January 6 and 17, and the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. Dundon’s striking photos recreate the immediacy and impact of the protests, while essays by historian Carmen Thompson and journalist Donnell Alexander contextualize the uprising’s sociopolitical background. A chronology and author’s note are also featured.
The publisher and author would like to thank the Magnum Foundation, Documentary Arts, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project for their generous support of this publication. Additional funding has been provided by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
Violence against women is one of the most insidious social ills facing the world today. Yet governmental response is inconsistent, ranging from dismissal to aggressive implementation of policies and programs to combat the problem. In her comparative study of thirty-six democratic governments, Laurel Weldon examines the root causes and consequences of the differences in public policy from Northern Europe to Latin America.
She reveals that factors that often influence the development of social policies do not determine policies on violence against women. Neither economic level, religion, region, nor the number of women in government determine governmental responsiveness to this problem. Weldon demonstrates, for example, that Nordic governments take no more action to combat violence against women than Latin American governments, even though the Swedish welfare state is often considered a leader in social policy, particularly with regard to women’s issues.
Instead, the presence of independently organized, active women’s movements plays a greater role in placing violence against women on the public agenda. The breadth and scope of governmental response is greatly enhanced by the presence of an office dedicated to promoting women’s status.
Weldon closes with practical lessons and insights to improve government action on violence against women and other important issues of social justice and democracy.
In The Protestant Ethic Revisited, pioneering sociologist Philip Gorski revisits the question raised by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism about how the Christian West was reshaped by world-changing energies of the Calvinist movement. Gorski not only considers the perennial debate about religion and capitalism, but he also devotes particular attention to the influence of Calvinism on the political development of the West.
The Protestant Ethic Revisited is a masterful new collection of Gorski's essays on religion and comparative historical sociology. Reflecting the aim of much of Gorski's work, this anthology shows how nationalism, secularism, politics, and religion in public life are either older—or less stable—than previously thought.
"In Protestant-Catholic-Jew Will Herberg has written the most fascinating essay on the religious sociology of America that has appeared in decades. He has digested all the relevant historical, sociological and other analytical studies, but the product is no mere summary of previous findings. He has made these findings the basis of a new and creative approach to the American scene. It throws as much light on American society as a whole as it does on the peculiarly religious aspects of American life. Mr. Herberg. . . illumines many facets of the American reality, and each chapter presents surprising, and yet very compelling, theses about the religious life of this country. Of all these perhaps the most telling is his thesis that America is not so much a melting pot as three fairly separate melting pots."—Reinhold Niebuhr, New Yorks Times Book Review
Catholicism has long been recognized as one of the major forces shaping the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) during the nineteenth century, but the role of Protestantism has not been fully explored. Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean traces the emergence of Protestantism in Cuba and Puerto Rico during a crucial period of national consolidation involving both social and political struggle. Using a comparative framework, Martínez-Fernández looks at the ways in which Protestantism, though officially “illegal” for most of the century, established itself, competed with Catholicism, and took differing paths in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
One of the book’s main goals is to trace the links between religion and politics, particularly with regard to early Protestant activities. Protestants encountered a complex social, economic, and political landscape both in Cuba and in Puerto Rico and soon found that their very presence, coupled with their demands for freedom of worship and burial rights, involved them in a series of interrelated struggles in which the Catholic Church was embroiled along with the other main forces of the period—the peasantry, the agrarian bourgeoisie, the mercantile bourgeoisie, and the colonial state. While the established Catholic Church increasingly identified with the conservative, pro-slavery, and colonialist causes, newly arrived Protestants tended to be nationalistic and to pursue particular economic activities—such as cigar exportation in Cuba and the sugar industry in Puerto Rico. The author argues that the early Protestant communities reflected the socio-cultural milieus from which they emerged and were profoundly shaped by the economic activities of their congregants. This influence, in turn, shaped not only the congregations’ composition, but also their political and social orientations.
Guatemala has undergone an unprecedented conversion to Protestantism since the 1970s, so that thirty percent of its people now belong to Protestant churches, more than in any other Latin American nation. To illuminate some of the causes of this phenomenon, Virginia Garrard-Burnett here offers the first history of Protestantism in a Latin American country, focusing specifically on the rise of Protestantism within the ethnic and political history of Guatemala.
Garrard-Burnett finds that while Protestant missionaries were early valued for their medical clinics, schools, translation projects, and especially for the counterbalance they provided against Roman Catholicism, Protestantism itself attracted few converts in Guatemala until the 1960s. Since then, however, the militarization of the state, increasing public violence, and the "globalization" of Guatemalan national politics have undermined the traditional ties of kinship, custom, and belief that gave Guatemalans a sense of identity, and many are turning to Protestantism to recreate a sense of order, identity, and belonging.
The strategic interactions between protestors and their targets shape the world around us in profound ways. The editors and contributors to Protesters and Their Targets—all leading scholars in the study of social movements—look at why movements do what they do and why their interactions with other societal actors turn out as they do. They recognize that targets are not stationary but react to the movement and require the movement to react back.
This edited collection analyzes how social movements select their targets, movement-target interactions, and the outcomes of those interactions. Case studies examine school closures in Sweden, the U.S. labor movement, Bolivian water and Mexican corn, and other global issues to show the strategic thinking, shifting objectives, and various degrees of success in the actions and nature of these protest movements.
Protesters and Their Targets seeks to develop a set of tools for the further development of the field’s future work on this underexplored set of interactions.
The Old Poor Law, which was established in 1601 in England and Wales and was in force until 1834, was administered by the local parish and dispensed goods and services to paupers, providing a uniquely comprehensive, premodern system of support for the poor. Providing for the Poor brings together academics and practitioners from across disciplines to reexamine the micropolitics of poverty in the long eighteenth century through the eyes of the poor, their providers, and enablers. Covering such topics as the providence of the parochial sixpence, which was given in order to get a beggar to move along to another parish, to coercive marriages, plebeian clothing, and the much broader implications of vagrancy toward the end of the long eighteenth century, this volume aims to bridge the gaps in our understanding of the experiences of people across the social spectrum whose lives were touched by the Old Poor Law. It brings together some of the wider arguments concerning the nature of welfare during economically difficult times and documents the rising bureaucracy inherent in the system to produce a radical new history of the Old Poor Law in astonishing detail.
This book is about some of the largest events of the twentieth century, about international war, economic collapse, new science and technologies, and about the transformation of an old mill town region into a modern American metropolis. But it sees those sweeping changes through the eyes of fourteen particular Bostonians, in an ambitious attempt to understand the disorienting experiences of recent history. These lives span the years from 1850 to 1980, a time when Boston, like all American cities, was being rebuilt according to the continually changing specifications of science, engineering, mass wealth, and big corporations.
From Boston Brahmins to self-made millionaires, Sam Warner, Jr., brings us into the diverse worlds of Robert Grant, judge and popular novelist; Mary Antin, mystic and advocate for immigrants; Fred Allen, radio comedian; Charles A. Stone and Edwin S. Webster, electrical engineers; Laura Elizabeth Richards, reformist clubwoman; Emily Greene Balch, economist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; William Madison Wood, textile magnate; Fred Erwin Beal, socialist labor organizer; Louise Andrews Kent, suburban housewife and writer; Vannevar Bush, science administrator; Laurence K. Marshall, electronics entrepreneur; James Bryant Conant, university president and educational reformer; and Rachel Carson, renowned science writer.
These varied lives have been deftly brought together to illuminate the many contradictory qualifies of today’s metropolitan life: ambitions for education and pervasive social neglect; conspicuous luxuries and endemic poverty; elaborate science and a poisoned environment; far-reaching cooperative networks of strangers and narrow, segregated neighborhoods; the multiplication of women’s roles and the entrapment of women in the home.
Individual experience—how one person lived as a child in a family and in a particular place, how people did their work—can bring renewed insight to the conflicts of modern life. This engrossing story speaks from an urge to recapture history through human lives and to examine its meaning as authentic experience. As Alfred Kazin expresses it, we are a nation of men and women who have endeavored to escape traditions, and therefore self-discovery is our preoccupation and delight.
Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy.
Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions.
The Provisions of War examines how soldiers, civilians, communities, and institutions have used food and its absence as both a destructive weapon and a unifying force in establishing governmental control and cultural cohesion during times of conflict. Historians as well as scholars of literature, regional studies, and religious studies problematize traditional geographic boundaries and periodization in this essay collection, analyzing various conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a foodways lens to reveal new insights about the parameters of armed interactions.
The subjects covered are as varied and inclusive as the perspectives offered—ranging from topics like military logistics and animal disease in colonial Africa, Indian vegetarian identity, and food in the counterinsurgency of the Malayan Emergency, to investigations of hunger in Egypt after World War I and American soldiers’ role in the making of US–Mexico borderlands. Taken together, the essays here demonstrate the role of food in shaping prewar political debates and postwar realities, revealing how dietary adjustments brought on by military campaigns reshape national and individual foodways and identities long after the cessation of hostilities
Aslanbeigui and Oakes demonstrate that Robinson’s professional identity was thoroughly embedded in a local scientific culture in which the Cambridge economists A. C. Pigou, John Maynard Keynes, Dennis Robertson, Piero Sraffa, Richard Kahn (Robinson’s closest friend on the Cambridge faculty), and her husband Austin Robinson were important figures. Although the economists Joan Robinson most admired—Pigou, Keynes, and their mentor Alfred Marshall—had discovered ideas of singular greatness, she was convinced that each had failed to grasp the essential theoretical significance of his own work. She made it her mission to recast their work both to illuminate their major contributions and to redefine a Cambridge tradition of economic thought. Based on the extensive correspondence of Robinson and her colleagues, The Provocative Joan Robinson is the story of a remarkable woman, the intellectual and social world of a legendary group of economists, and the interplay between ideas, ambitions, and disciplinary communities.
dealing with issues of agency. The authors raise issues that are very
important . . . and they raise them as they must be raised--by bridging
theory and action." -- Kathryn Pine Addelson, author of Moral
Passages: Toward a Collectivist Moral Theory
Both the women's liberation movement and those who have studied it characterize
agency as the capacity to make change in individual consciousness, personal
lives, and society. The seventeen contributors to Provoking Agents
explore whether--and how--feminist theory, writing, and other social practices
can help readers move beyond seeing women as a powerless group to effecting
changes in their own lives and, ultimately, becoming social activists.
Topics in this multi-disciplinary collection range from maternal surrogacy
to writing, from consciousness-raising to AIDS activism, from pornography
to local organizing
Philip L. Simpson provides an original and broad overview of the evolving serial killer genre in the two media most responsible for its popularity: literature and cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.
The fictional serial killer, with a motiveless, highly individualized modus operandi, is the latest manifestation of the multiple murderers and homicidal maniacs that haunt American literature and, particularly, visual media such as cinema and television. Simpson theorizes that the serial killer genre results from a combination of earlier genre depictions of multiple murderers, inherited Gothic storytelling conventions, and threatening folkloric figures reworked over the years into a contemporary mythology of violence. Updated and repackaged for mass consumption, the Gothic villains, the monsters, the vampires, and the werewolves of the past have evolved into the fictional serial killer, who clearly reflects American cultural anxieties at the start of the twenty-first century.
Citing numerous sources, Simpson argues that serial killers’ recent popularity as genre monsters owes much to their pliability to any number of authorial ideological agendas from both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. Serial killers in fiction are a kind of debased and traumatized visionary, whose murders privately and publicly re-empower them with a pseudo-divine aura in the contemporary political moment. The current fascination with serial killer narratives can thus be explained as the latest manifestation of the ongoing human fascination with tales of gruesome murders and mythic villains finding a receptive audience in a nation galvanized by the increasingly apocalyptic tension between the extremist philosophies of both the New Right and the anti-New Right.
Faced with a blizzard of works of varying quality dealing with the serial killer, Simpson has ruled out the catalog approach in this study in favor of in-depth an analysis of the best American work in the genre. He has chosen novels and films that have at least some degree of public name-recognition or notoriety, including Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, Manhunter directed by Michael Mann, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer directed by John McNaughton, Seven directed by David Fincher, Natural Born Killers directed by Oliver Stone, Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.
The first sustained conversation between Marxism, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis in biblical studies
This volume pursues critical readings of the Bible that put psychoanalysis into conversation with Marxist and postcolonial criticism. In these essays psychoanalysis provides a way to mediate between Marxism's materialist groundings and postcolonialism's resistance against empire. The essays in the volume illuminate the way empire has shaped the biblical text by looking at the biblical texts' silences, ruptures, oversights, over-emphases, and inexplicable elements. These details are read as symptoms of a set of oppressive material relations that shaped and continue to haunt the text in the ascendancy of the text in the name of the West.
Features:
- Essays and responses from multiple perspectives and geographical locations, including Africa, Australia, Oceania, Latin America, and North America
- Psychoanalysis that considers how the traumas of colonialism manifest both materially and psychically
- Close readings of biblical texts
“I got 1-2-3-4 psychobilly DNA”—Norm and the Nightmarez
Call it punk rockabilly with science-fiction horror lyrics. The outsider musical genre known as psychobilly, which began in 1980s Britain, fuses punk, heavy metal, new wave, and shock rock with carnivalesque elements. The participants in this underground scene sport coffin tattoos and 1950s fashions. Bands such as The Meteors, Nekromantix, and Demented Are Go play with a wild energy and a fast tempo. Sometimes fake blood runs down a performer’s mouth.
Psychobilly is ethnomusicologist Kimberly Kattari’s fascinating, decade-long study of this little-known anti-mainstream genre. She provides a history and introduces readers to the core aspects of the music as she interviews passionate performers and fans. Kattari seeks to understand how psychobilly so strongly affects—and reflects—its participants’ lives and identities so strongly. She observes that it provides not only a sense of belonging but a response to feelings and experiences of socio-economic marginalization and stigmatization.
Psychobilly shows how this subculture organized around music furnishes an outlet for members to resist normative expectations and survive; they adhere to their own rules by having a good time while going through a hard time.
This book offers an analysis of ten works by the leading twentieth-century Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki (1867–1916), by one of Japan's most distinguished psychiatrists. Dr. Takeo Doi, whose Amae no Kozo is well known in the West in its English translation, The Anatomy of Dependency, describes the principal characters of Soseki's novels from a psychological point of view, treating them as case studies and demonstrating the clarity and accuracy of Soseki's psychological insights.
This volume, one of the few pieces of literary criticism ever translated from the Japanese, will introduce the reader to these novels, some of which are not available in English. Furthermore, the book is a penetrating account of the universal problems faced by individuals coping with a rapidly modernizing society.
A provocative look at America on the couch.In Psychotherapy as Religion, William Epstein sets out to debunk claims that psychotherapy provides successful clinical treatment for a wide range of personal and social problems. He argues that the practice is not a science at all but rather the civil religion of America, reflecting the principles of radical self-invention and self-reliance deeply embedded in the psyche of the nation. Epstein begins by analyzing a number of clinical studies conducted over the past two decades that purport to establish the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic treatments. He finds that each study violates in some way the standard criteria of scientific credibility and that the field has completely failed to establish objective procedures and measurements to assess clinical outcomes. Epstein exposes psychotherapy’s deep roots in the religious and intellectual movements of the early nineteenth century by demonstrating striking parallels between various types of therapy and such popular practices as Christian Science and spiritualism. Psychotherapy has taken root in our culture because it so effectively reflects our national faith in individual responsibility for social and personal problems. It thrives as the foundation of American social welfare policy, blaming deviance and misery on deficiencies of character rather than on the imperfections of society and ignoring the influence of unequal and deficient social conditions while requiring miscreants to undergo the moral reeducation that psychotherapy represents. This is a provocative, brilliantly argued look at America on the couch. Psychotherapy as Religion is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and current state of mental health.
The essays in Public Affairs reflect on a number of sex scandals while emphasizing the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, certainly the most avidly followed and momentous sex scandal in American political history. Leading scholars situate contemporary public affairs in the context not only of earlier sex scandals in American politics (such as Thomas Jefferson’s and Sally Hemings’s affair), but also of more purely political scandals (including Teapot Dome and Watergate) and sex scandals centered around public figures other than politicians (such as the actor Hugh Grant and the minister Jimmy Swaggart). Some essays consider the Clinton affair in light of feminist and anti-racist politics, while others discuss the dynamics of scandals as major media events. By charting a critical path through the muck of scandal rather than around it, Public Affairs illuminates why sex scandals have become such a prominent feature of American public life.
Contributors. Paul Apostolidis, Jodi Dean, Joshua Gamson, Theodore J. Lowi, Joshua D. Rothman, George Shulman, Anna Marie Smith, Jeremy Varon, Juliet A. Williams
This essay collection explores how the definition of catastrophe might be expanded to include many forms of large-scale structural violence on communities, species, and ecosystems. Using feminist methodologies, the contributors to Public Catastrophes, Private Losses trace the connections between seemingly unrelated forms of violence such as structural racism, environmental degradation, and public health crises. In contrast to a news media that focuses on mass fatalities and immediate consequences, these essays call our attention to how catastrophes can also involve slow violence with long-term effects.
The authors also consider how these catastrophes are profoundly shaped by government action or inaction, offering a powerful critique of how government neglect has cost lives and demonstrating how vulnerable populations can be better protected. The essays in this collection examine how public catastrophes imprint themselves on lives, as individuals and communities narrate, process, and grapple with legacies of loss. The book is thus a feminist intervention that challenges the binary between public and private, personal and political.
In the 1800s, urban development efforts modernized Paris and encouraged the creation of brothels, boulevards, cafés, dancehalls, and even public urinals. However, complaints also arose regarding an apparent increase in public sexual activity, and the appearance of “individuals of both sexes with depraved morals” in these spaces. Andrew Israel Ross’s illuminating study, Public City/Public Sex, chronicles the tension between the embourgeoisement and democratization of urban culture in nineteenth-century Paris and the commercialization and commodification of a public sexual culture, the emergence of new sex districts, as well as the development of gay and lesbian subcultures.
Public City/Public Sex examines how the notion that male sexual desire required suitable outlets shaped urban policing and development. Ross traces the struggle to control sex in public and argues that it was the very effort to police the city that created new opportunities for women who sold sex and men who sought sex with other men. Placing public sex at the center of urban history, Ross shows how those who used public spaces played a central role in defining the way the city was understood.
The authors provide an eye-opening account of recent battles over publicly financed stadiums in some of America’s largest cities. Their interviews with the key decision makers present a behind-the-scenes look at how and why powerful individuals and organizations foist these sports palaces on increasingly unreceptive communities.
Delaney and Eckstein show that in the face of studies demonstrating that new sports facilities don’t live up to their promise of big money, proponents are using a new tactic to win public subsidies¾intangible “social” rewards, such as prestige and community cohesion. The authors find these to be empty promises as well, demonstrating that new stadiums may exacerbate, rather than erase, social problems in cities.
The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community edited by Carrie N. Baker and Aviva Dove-Viebahn, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond the traditional academic classroom and scholarly journals to share their work with the public.
Part one explores how feminist scholars engage broader audiences through art, media, and public programming, including essays on a public discussion series teaching intersectional feminist analysis of popular films, and a podcast from Latina scholars discussing issues of reproductive justice, social justice, motherhood, sexuality, race, and gender. Part two focuses on activism and public education, including essays on “Take Back the Night,” and archiving the women’s march protests. Part three turns to public writing and scholarship, including an essay on elevating the perspectives and voices of underrepresented creatives in the film and television industry. Part four explores feminist pedagogies for community engagement and for teaching public feminisms.
Accessible and engaging to a broad range of readers, the essays in this volume are a rich resource for scholars and students interested in infusing their academic knowledge into the public sphere. With this timely book, the editors offer an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and highlight some of the important public-facing work feminist scholars are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable.
By confronting these conflicted reactions to photography, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites make the case for a fundamental shift in understanding photography and public culture. In place of suspicions about the medium’s capacity for distraction, deception, and manipulation, they suggest how it can provide resources for democratic communication and thoughtful reflection about contemporary social problems.
The key to living well in the image world is to unlock photography from viewing habits that inhibit robust civic spectatorship. Through insightful interpretations of dozens of news images, The Public Image reveals how the artistry of the still image can inform, challenge, and guide reflection regarding endemic violence, environmental degradation, income inequity, and other chronic problems that will define the twenty-first century.
By shifting from conventional suspicions to a renewed encounter with the image, we are challenged to see more deeply on behalf of a richer life for all, and to acknowledge our obligations as spectators who are, crucially, also citizens.
Library History Round Table Reads Selection, March 2024
Alexandria Historical Society Special Merit Award, 2023
When Alexandria, Virginia’s first public library was constructed just a few blocks from his home, Samuel Wilbert Tucker, a young, Black attorney, was appalled to learn that he could not use the library because of his race. Inspired by the legal successes of the NAACP in discrimination cases, he organized a grassroots protest to desegregate the library that his tax dollars supported.
Public in Name Only tells the important, but largely forgotten, story of Tucker and a group of Black citizens who agitated for change in the terms and conditions of their lives. Employing the combined strategies of direct-action public protest, nonviolent civil disobedience, and municipal litigation, Tucker’s initiative dovetailed with the national priorities and tactics of larger civil rights organizations. While Tucker’s campaign did not end with the desegregation of the Alexandria Library, but instead resulted in the creation of a “separate-and-unequal” Jim Crow Black branch, the sit-in demonstration represents a momentous early struggle for racial equity waged through civil rights activism.
A major economic industry among American Indian tribes is the public promotion and display of aspects of their cultural heritage in a wide range of tourist venues. Few do it better than the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, whose homeland is the Qualla Boundary of North Carolina. Through extensive research into the work of other scholars dating back to the late 1800s, and interviews with a wide range of contemporary Cherokees, Beard-Moose presents the two faces of the Cherokee people. One is the public face that populates the powwows, dramatic presentations, museums, and myriad roadside craft locations. The other is the private face whose homecoming, Indian fairs, traditions, belief system, community strength, and cultural heritage are threatened by the very activities that put food on their tables. Constructing an ethnohistory of tourism and comparing the experiences of the Cherokee with the Florida Seminoles and Southwestern tribes, this work brings into sharp focus the fine line between promoting and selling Indian culture.
The latest volume in the Urban Agenda series looks at pressing infrastructure issues discussed at the 2017 UIC Urban Forum. Topics include: competing notions of the infrastructure ideal; what previous large infrastructure programs can teach the Trump Administration; how infrastructure influences city design; the architecture of the cities of tomorrow; who benefits from infrastructure improvements; and evaluations of projects like the Chicago Riverwalk and grassroots efforts to reclaim neighborhood parks from gangs.
Contributors: Philip Ashton, Beverly S. Bunch, Bill Burton, Charles Hoch, Sean Lally, and Sanjeev Vidyarthi
Nearly as soon as television began to enter American homes in the late 1940s, social activists recognized that it was a powerful tool for shaping the nation’s views. By targeting broadcast regulations and laws, both liberal and conservative activist groups have sought to influence what America sees on the small screen. Public Interests describes the impressive battles that these media activists fought and charts how they tried to change the face of American television.
This book offers much-needed critical awareness of the less easily recognized ways in which ultrasound technology is profoundly social and political in the United States today.
Vigil also reveals how these conversations inevitably engage with gender concerns, showing how the role of gender in this relationship is neither static nor consistent over time. Examining how these works represent such things as gendered Latina/o counter publics, how Central American–American communities are gendered in relation to other US Latina/o communities, how and why gendered expressions of Latinidad are produced and marketed, and how print media provides an important space for dissemination of diverse ideas, Public Negotiations considers the way in which gender functions in terms of both the construction and reception of a Latina/o public in a transnational space. Through thorough examination and with deep insight, Vigil shows how literature can invaluably reflect current and historical issues surrounding media and the public sphere and help us imagine new, hopefully better, possibilities.
In 1753, at the request of the London Jewish community, the Peiham administration passed an act repealing the religious test that prevented Jewish aliens from being naturalized. This act, formally known as the Jewish Naturalization Act, was of negligible practical importance, but political opponents exploited the issue for an upcoming election campaign. The "Jew Bill" became a battle cry that swept across England. The Peiham administration, sensing the political damage that could be caused by the bill, bowed to the clamor and then took the initiative in defeating its own act.
This book is the first thorough account of that notorious but little-understood episode in English history. Using a largely narrative form the author first discusses the position of the Jews in the mid-eighteenth century and explains why they sought and obtained passage of the bill. He then recounts the beginnings of opposition to it and discusses the religious, economic, political, and psychological reasons for the opposition. He describes in detail the propaganda campaign against the bill and the resultant effect on the election.
The author concludes that this was not an isolated explosion of anti-Semitism, but rather a renewal of a long-standing debate over general naturalization policy. He further concludes that Parliament was more sensitive to public opinion than is generally supposed and that the terms "Whig supremacy" or "trusteeship" are not entirely accurate.
The reader will find that this study reveals much of the English political system of that era: the style and structure of parliamentary politics and electioneering; religious attitudes and economic notions; and the methods and ethical and intellectual standards of journalism and political propaganda.
A solution to inequalities wherever we look—in health care, secure retirement, education—is as close as the public library. Or the post office, community pool, or local elementary school. Public options—reasonably priced government-provided services that coexist with private options—are all around us, ready to increase opportunity, expand freedom, and reawaken civic engagement if we will only let them.
Whenever you go to your local public library, send mail via the post office, or visit Yosemite, you are taking advantage of a longstanding American tradition: the public option. Some of the most useful and beloved institutions in American life are public options—yet they are seldom celebrated as such. These government-supported opportunities coexist peaceably alongside private options, ensuring equal access and expanding opportunity for all.
Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne Alstott challenge decades of received wisdom about the proper role of government and consider the vast improvements that could come from the expansion of public options. Far from illustrating the impossibility of effective government services, as their critics claim, public options hold the potential to transform American civic life, offering a wealth of solutions to seemingly intractable problems, from housing shortages to the escalating cost of health care.
Imagine a low-cost, high-quality public option for child care. Or an extension of the excellent Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees to all Americans. Or every person having access to an account at the Federal Reserve Bank, with no fees and no minimums. From broadband internet to higher education, The Public Option reveals smart new ways to meet pressing public needs while spurring healthy competition. More effective than vouchers or tax credits, public options could offer us all fairer choices and greater security.
Public Performances offers a deep and wide-ranging exploration of relationships among genres of public performance and of the underlying political motivations they share. Illustrating the connections among three themes—the political, the carnivalesque, and the ritualesque—this volume provides rich and comprehensive insight into public performance as an assertion of political power.
Contributors consider how public genres of performance express not only celebration but also dissent, grief, and remembrance; examine the permeability of the boundaries between genres; and analyze the approval or regulation of such events by municipalities and other institutions. Where the particular use of public space is not sanctioned or where that use meets with hostility from institutions or represents a critique of them, performers are effectively reclaiming public space to make public statements on their own terms—an act of popular sovereignty.
Through these concepts, Public Performances distinguishes the sometimes overlapping dimensions of public symbolic display. Carnival, and thus the carnivalesque, is understood to possess tacit social permission for unconventional or even deviant performance, on the grounds that normal social order will resume when the performance concludes. Ritual, and the ritualesque, leverages a deeper symbolic sensibility, one believed—or at least intended—by the participants to effect transformative, longer-term change.
Contributors: Roger D. Abrahams, John Borgonovo, Laurent Sébastien Fournier, Lisa Gilman, Barbara Graham, David Harnish, Samuel Kinser, Scott Magelssen, Elena Martinez, Pamela Moro, Beverly J. Stoeltje, Daniel Wojcik, Dorothy L. Zinn
In this globally interconnected planet, we are increasingly able to access exotic locales without ever actually seeing these places firsthand. Instead, what we perceive to be fresh cultural experiences are actually second-hand moments, filtered through mediums such as television, film, the internet, CD-Roms, and various other media.
Ellen Strain posits that the images in film and popular culture not only fill in the gaps of a person’s first-hand—or rather, lack of first-hand—experience with other cultural situations, but also predisposes the “tourist gaze” to view particular locales in a predetermined way. She theorizes the idea of a touristic way of understanding the world in general. How, she asks, are our cross-cultural perceptions of places and peoples created in the first place? Can a set of images—such as postcards—mediate our vision of distant geographies? Are there culturally constructed strategies set up to mediate our cross-cultural perceptions of the exotic? Strain includes the works of Jules Verne, E. M. Forster, and Michael Crichton, as well as film, CD-Rom travel games and virtual reality in her own authorial gaze.
Public Places, Private Journeys is a unique postmodern exploration of how individuals see across cultural differences in an era of increasingly commercialized and globalized culture.
The decentralization of public policy from the federal government to state and local governments offers increased opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate directly in public policymaking. Yet these opportunities may not be equally shared. Due to a variety of factors, low-income citizens have long been denied a meaningful role in the public life and governance of our country.
By contrast, the essays in this volume explore how low-income citizens have successfully affected public policy. The book is built around six case studies, all from Texas, that cover education finance and reform, local infrastructure provision, environmental protection, and indigent health care.
This research illuminates several issues of national importance, including how communities gain standing and recognition for themselves and their issues, how policy agendas are defined, how communities mobilize technical and institutional resources, and how they form coalitions and alliances to accomplish their goals.
Public policy advocates routinely assert that “research has shown” a particular policy to be desirable. But how reliable is the analysis in the research they invoke? And how does that analysis affect the way policy is made, on issues ranging from vaccination to minimum wage to FDA drug approval? Charles Manski argues here that current policy is based on untrustworthy analysis. By failing to account for uncertainty in an unpredictable world, policy analysis misleads policy makers with expressions of certitude. Public Policy in an Uncertain World critiques the status quo and offers an innovation to improve how policy research is conducted and how policy makers use research.
Consumers of policy analysis, whether civil servants, journalists, or concerned citizens, need to understand research methodology well enough to properly assess reported findings. In the current model, policy researchers base their predictions on strong assumptions. But as Manski demonstrates, strong assumptions lead to less credible predictions than weaker ones. His alternative approach takes account of uncertainty and thereby moves policy analysis away from incredible certitude and toward honest portrayal of partial knowledge. Manski describes analysis of research on such topics as the effect of the death penalty on homicide, of unemployment insurance on job-seeking, and of preschooling on high school graduation. And he uses other real-world scenarios to illustrate the course he recommends, in which policy makers form reasonable decisions based on partial knowledge of outcomes, and journalists evaluate research claims more closely, with a skeptical eye toward expressions of certitude.
Documenting a wide range of reactions to two radically different events—the invasion of Iraq and the creation of the faith-based initiatives program—Tipton charts the new terrain of religious and moral argument under the Bush administration from Pat Robertson to Jim Wallis. He then turns to the case of the United Methodist Church, of which President Bush is a member, to uncover the twentieth-century history of their political advocacy, culminating in current threats to split the Church between liberal peace-and-justice activists and crusaders for evangelical renewal. Public Pulpits balances the firsthand drama of this internal account with a meditative exploration of the wider social impact that mainline churches have had in a time of diverging fortunes and diminished dreams of progress.
An eminently fair-minded and ethically astute analysis of how churches keep moral issues alive in politics, Public Pulpits delves deep into mainline Protestant efforts to enlarge civic conscience and cast clearer light on the commonweal and offers a masterly overview of public religion in America.
During the 1980s, religious traditions around the world, from Islamic fundamentalism to Catholic liberation theology, began making their way, often forcefully, out of the private sphere and into public life, causing the "deprivatization" of religion in contemporary life. No longer content merely to administer pastoral care to individual souls, religious institutions are challenging dominant political and social forces, raising questions about the claims of entities such as nations and markets to be "value neutral", and straining the traditional connections of private and public morality.
Casanova looks at five cases from two religious traditions (Catholicism and Protestantism) in four countries (Spain, Poland, Brazil, and the United States). These cases challenge postwar—and indeed post-Enlightenment—assumptions about the role of modernity and secularization in religious movements throughout the world.
This book expands our understanding of the increasingly significant role religion plays in the ongoing construction of the modern world.
Two months after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana took control of nearly all the public schools in New Orleans. Today, all of the city’s public schools are charter schools. Although many analyses mark the beginning of education reform in New Orleans with Katrina, in Public Schools, Private Governance, J. Celeste Layargues that the storm merely accelerated the timeline for reforms that had inched along incrementally over the previous decade. Both before and after Katrina, white reformers purposely excluded Black educators, community members, and parents.
Public Schools, Private Governance traces the slow, deliberate dismantling of New Orleans’ public schools, and the processes that have maintained the reforms made in Katrina’s immediate aftermath, showing how Black parents and residents were left without a voice and the officials charged with school governance, most of whom are white, with little accountability. Lay cogently explains how political minorities disrupted systems to create change and keep reforms in place, and the predictable political effects—exclusion, frustration, and resignation—on the part of those most directly affected.
Through detailed chronologies, B. J. Bullert traces how independently produced documentaries pushed the limits of public television between 1985 and 1993. She interviews the key players, film makers, programmers, journalists, and representatives of interest groups to illuminate how together they sought to frame and constrain viewers on perceptions of provocative works. Their stories are set against the backdrop of a larger story about the relationship between federal funding for the arts and public broadcasting and the promise of a democratic society. Bullert brings to light the subtle forces and interests that effectively control the style and content of documentaries that have been broadcast with the PBS logo.
When film makers brought uncommon realities to the public television airwaves, a complex collective response from station programmers, interest groups, journalists, and viewers ensued. Public Television charts the communication process through which visions of reality deemed threatening to some are packaged to make them more palatable for public television viewers.
We commonly think of marriage as a private matter between two people, a personal expression of love and commitment. In this pioneering history, Nancy F. Cott demonstrates that marriage is and always has been a public institution.
From the founding of the United States to the present day, imperatives about the necessity of marriage and its proper form have been deeply embedded in national policy, law, and political rhetoric. Legislators and judges have envisioned and enforced their preferred model of consensual, lifelong monogamy--a model derived from Christian tenets and the English common law that posits the husband as provider and the wife as dependent.In early confrontations with Native Americans, emancipated slaves, Mormon polygamists, and immigrant spouses, through the invention of the New Deal, federal income tax, and welfare programs, the federal government consistently influenced the shape of marriages. And even the immense social and legal changes of the last third of the twentieth century have not unraveled official reliance on marriage as a "pillar of the state."
By excluding some kinds of marriages and encouraging others, marital policies have helped to sculpt the nation's citizenry, as well as its moral and social standards, and have directly affected national understandings of gender roles and racial difference. Public Vows is a panoramic view of marriage's political history, revealing the national government's profound role in our most private of choices. No one who reads this book will think of marriage in the same way again.
From white-collar executives to mail carriers, public workers meet the needs of the entire nation. Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin edit a collection of new research on this understudied workforce. Part One begins in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century to explore how questions of race, class, and gender shaped public workers, their workplaces, and their place in American democracy. In Part Two, essayists examine race and gender discrimination while revealing the subtle contemporary forms of marginalization that keep Black men and Black and white women underpaid and overlooked for promotion. The historic labor actions detailed in Part Three illuminate how city employees organized not only for better pay and working conditions but to seek recognition from city officials, the public, and the national labor movement. Part Four focuses on nurses and teachers to address the thorny question of whether certain groups deserve premium pay for their irreplaceable work and sacrifices or if serving the greater good is a reward unto itself.
Contributors: Eileen Boris, Cathleen D. Cahill, Frederick W. Gooding Jr., William P. Jones, Francis Ryan, Jon Shelton, Joseph E. Slater, Katherine Turk, Eric S. Yellin, and Amy Zanoni
Even the most comprehensive Renaissance histories have neglected the vibrant groups of women writers that emerged in cities across Italy during the mid-1500s—and the thriving network of printers, publishers, and agents that specialized in producing and selling their books. In Publishing Women, Diana Robin finally brings to life this story of women’s cultural and intellectual leadership in early modern Italy, illuminating the factors behind—and the significance of—their sudden dominance.
Focusing on the collective publication process, Robin portrays communities in Naples, Venice, Rome, Siena, and Florence, where women engaged in activities that ranged from establishing literary salons to promoting religious reform. Her innovative cultural history considers the significant roles these women played in tandem with men, rather than separated from them. In doing so, it collapses the borders between women’s history, Renaissance and Reformation studies, and book history to evoke a historical moment that catapulted women’s writings and women-sponsored books into the public sphere for the first time anywhere in Europe.
Brown addresses an understudied period of Pueblo Indian/Spanish colonial history of New Mexico with a work that paints a portrait of pre-contact times through the colonial period with a special emphasis on the eighteenth century. The Pueblo communities that the Spaniards encountered were divided by language, religion,and political and kinship organization. Brown highlights the changes to, but also the maintenance of, social practices and beliefs in the economic, political, spiritual and familial and intimate realms of life that resulted from Pueblo attempts to negotiate Spanish colonial power.
The author combines an analysis of eighteenth century Spanish documentation with archaeological findings concerning Pueblo beliefs and practices that spans the pre-contact period to the eighteenth century in the Southwest. Brown presents a nonlinear view of Pueblo life that examines politics, economics, ritual, and personal relationships. The book paints a portrait of the Pueblo peoples and their complex responses to Spanish colonialism by making sense of little-researched archival documents and archaeological findings that cast light on the daily life of Pueblo peoples.
In Pueblos, Plains, and Province Joseph P. Sánchez offers an in-depth examination of sociopolitical conflict in seventeenth-century New Mexico, detailing the effects of Spanish colonial policies on settlers’, missionaries’, and Indigenous peoples’ struggle for economic and cultural control of the region. Sánchez explores the rich archival documentation that provides cultural, linguistic, and legal views of the values of the period.
Spanish dual Indian policies for Pueblo and Plains tribes challenged Indigenous political and social systems to conform to the imperial structure for pacification purposes. Meanwhile, missionary efforts to supplant Indigenous religious beliefs with a Christian worldview resulted, in part, in a syncretism of the two worlds. Indigenous resentment of these policies reflected the contentious disagreements between Spanish clergymen and civil authorities, who feuded over Indigenous labor, and encroachment on tribal sovereignties with demands for sworn loyalty to Spanish governance. The little-studied “starvation period” adversely affected Spanish-Pueblo relationships for the remainder of the century and contributed significantly to the battle at Acoma, the Jumano War, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
Pueblos, Plains, and Province shows how history, culture, and tradition in New Mexico shaped the heritage shared by Spain, Mexico, the United States, and Native American tribes and will be of interest to scholars and students of Indigenous, colonial, and borderlands history.
Winner of the Critics’ Choice Book awards of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA-CCBA)
The postwar migration of Puerto Rican men and women to Chicago brought thousands of their children into city schools. These children's classroom experience continued the colonial project begun in their homeland, where American ideologies had dominated Puerto Rican education since the island became a US territory. Mirelsie Velázquez tells how Chicago's Puerto Ricans pursued their educational needs in a society that constantly reminded them of their status as second-class citizens. Communities organized a media culture that addressed their concerns while creating and affirming Puerto Rican identities. Education also offered women the only venue to exercise power, and they parlayed their positions to take lead roles in activist and political circles. In time, a politicized Puerto Rican community gave voice to a previously silenced group--and highlighted that colonialism does not end when immigrants live among their colonizers.
A perceptive look at big-city community building, Puerto Rican Chicago reveals the links between justice in education and a people's claim to space in their new home.
Building its incisive narrative from a wide range of archival sources, interviews, and first-person accounts of Puerto Rican life in New York, this book illuminates the rich history of a group that is still largely invisible to many scholars. At the center of Puerto Rican Citizen are Puerto Ricans’ own formulations about political identity, the responses of activists and ordinary migrants to the failed promises of American citizenship, and their expectations of how the American state should address those failures. Complicating our understanding of the discontents of modern liberalism, of race relations beyond black and white, and of the diverse conceptions of rights and identity in American life, Thomas’s book transforms the way we understand this community’s integral role in shaping our sense of citizenship in twentieth-century America.
To combat these two problems, and drawing n a tradition of patriotism and social responsibility, a number of organizations grew up, including the Young Lords Party (YLP), which later evolved into the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization; the Pro Independence Movement (MPI), which evolved into the U.S> branch of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party; El Comite; the Puerto Rican Student Union (PRSU); the Movement for National Liberation (MLN); and the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN). THe Puerto Rican Movement looks at all these groups as specific organizations of real people in such places as Boston, Chicago, Hartford, New York, and Philadelphia.
The contributors, almost all of whom were involved with the organizations they describe, provide detailed descriptions and historical analyses of the Puerto Rican Left. Interviews with such key figures as Elizam Escobar, Piri Thomas, and Luis Fuentes, as well as accounts by people active in the gay/lesbian, African American, and white Left movements add a vivid picture of why and how people became radicalized and how their ideals intersected with their group's own dynamics.
These critical assessments highlight each organization's accomplishments and failures and illuminate how different sets of people, in different circumstances, respond to social problems -- in this case, the "national question" and the issues of social justice and movement politics.
Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor is the only comprehensive study of the role of Puerto Rican women workers in the evolution of a transnational labor force in the twentieth century.
This book examines Puerto Rican women workers, both in Puerto Rico and on the U.S. mainland. It contains a range of information--historical, ethnographic, and statistical. The contributors provide insights into the effects of migration and unionization on women's work, taking into account U.S. colonialism and globalization of capitalism throughout the century as well as the impact of Operation Bootstrap. The essays are arranged in chronological order to reveal the evolutionary nature of women's work and the fluctuations in migration, technology, and the economy. This one-of-a-kind collection will be a valuable resource for those interested in women's studies, ethnic studies, and Puerto Rican and Latino studies, as well as labor studies.
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